Eminem

January 31, 2010

The Grammys hadn't even started and already four of the five hip-hop awards had been handed out. Jay-Z grabbed two of them -- Best Rap Solo Performance for "D.O.A." and Best Rap Song for "Run This Town" with Rihanna and Kanye West. The latter added a second award -- and the only one presented live on the broadcast, Best Rap/Sung Collaboration -- to bring Jigga's total to three for the night.

Once presenters Mos Def and Placido Domingo figured out how to open the envelope and read "Run This Town," Rihanna and Jay-Z stepped to the stage and thanked the absent "genius that is Kanye West" in a speech kept brief.

Soon after, Wyclef Jean was given a solo spotlight to make his pitch for continued Haiti support.

Eminem's Relapse won Best Rap Album honors, which comes as no surprise to us, but is still a disappointment. The Grammys could have picked up some more credibility by not making the obvious choice. (Q-Tip's The Renaissance would have received my vote.) Em's "Crack A Bottle" collaboration with Dr. Dre and 50 Cent also won Best Rap Performance By A Duo Or Group, putting our first-ever predictions at 2-for-5. (We apparently overestimated the influence of Justin Timberlake on Grammy voters.)

One of the early highlights was a Beyonce medley that included an angry performance of Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know." Did Jay-Z do something we don't know about? Jay did win the face off with B in the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category, as his Kanye collabo beat hers. In fact, West had a 60 percent chance of winning, lending a hand to three of the five nominees.

In a bizarre twist, what was presented by Robert Downey Jr. as an opera performance quickly turned into a Jamie Foxx set that grew to include T-Pain, Doug E. Fresh and Slash. Foxx closed with "I apologize for the auto-tune Jay-Z." Eminem, Drake and Lil' Wayne also performed.

Beyonce finished with a record six trophies for a female artist, beating the five she, Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and others had won at previous shows.

January 30, 2010

The 411 Online has kept a record of every rap Grammy ever awarded, but we've never tried predicting who would win before. That changes now. It's not easy getting into the warped mind of the Grammy voters, who often overvalue pop artists, fall in love with creating repeat winners or just generally have no clue.

January 07, 2009

While the world still waits for Detox, some of Dr. Dre's roadblocks are slowly moving out of the way.

Eminem's now-completed "Crack a Bottle" single finally dropped Tuesday. An earlier version of the song leaked in November with Em doing Dre's vocals for the legendary producer to use as a reference track.

Meanwhile, 50 Cent, who also is featured on "Bottle," unveiled his latest, "I Get It In," on Hot 97 that night, as well as a tracklisting of his upcoming disc. It shows four production credits for Dre, who is also expected to appear on the mic.

December 17, 2008

One casualty of Eminem's upcoming album is a frequent visitor to the backburner: Dr. Dre's long-awaited Detox album.

Eminem told Billboard that he and Dre have been "up to our old mischievous ways" during the making of Relapse. (Isn't that supposed to come after the detox?)

It will be Em's first album since 2004's Encore, which gave the MC a much needed break from over-exposure and will likely set this disc up to succeed. However, Eminem is "really heated" about leaks, including one that had him reciting Dre's lines. "It wasn't close to finished, and it even has me doing guide vocals for Dre as a suggestion of how he could lay his verses down," he said in the interview, which was conducted via e-mail. It's like someone catches you peeping in your window
before you got the Spider Man costume all zipped up! Nobody is supposed to see that."

Swizz Beats' claims that he had worked on a sequel to "Stan" also raised Em's temp.

"There isn't a 'Stan 2,' and there won't be. Stan drove his car off a bridge and I'm not writing a song as Stan's ghost. That would just be really corny... I haven't worked with Swizz on this album," adding that Dre is his preferred producer.

"I don't have chemistry like that with anyone else as far as producers go -- not even close. Dre will end up producing the majority of the tracks on Relapse."